Doom II

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"Doom 2" redirects here. For other topics with similar names, see Doom2.

Doom II: Hell on Earth is the first sequel to Doom, released by id Software on September 30, 1994. Featuring 32 levels in a single linear episode, Doom II continues Doom's story, seeing the player returning to Earth to single-handedly fight off an invasion of the planet by demons.

Doom II includes several gameplay enhancements over the original Doom. Most notable are the introduction of several new monster types, plus an additional weapon (the super shotgun). While the original game was distributed via shareware and mail order (to purchase the full game), Doom II was the first game developed by id Software to be sold commercially in stores, with cooperation of distributor GT Interactive. This represented a change in business model for id that would later be adopted more widely.

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Doom's story ended with the Marine protagonist's defeat of the Spider Mastermind in Hell. Stepping through a portal to Earth which opens after the creature's death, however, there is a cliffhanger ending - it is discovered that the demons which invaded the Mars moonbases have now invaded Earth as well.

After Earth's major cities are left in ruins by the attack, the human survivors await evacuation from a starport, but the demons have surrounded it with a barrier of flames. All of humanity's remaining soldiers make a desperate assault on the starport, but eventually they are annihilated and only the Marine remains.

Fighting through the starport, the Marine manages to lower the demonic defenses, allowing the survivors to escape to the safety of space. Left behind, he at first prepares for death, but soon receives a radio message from the ships' commanders that they have pinpointed the source of the demonic invasion not far from his current location. He fights through the ravaged city, where Hell's reality is once again beginning to merge with our own, twisting and corrupting the heavily damaged ruins. After finding the portal to Hell and returning once more to the underworld, the Marine eventually confronts the ultimate source of the hellspawn, a gigantic demon. Pumping his rockets into the creature's exposed brain, it dies, devastating miles of Hell's surface in all directions in its death throes, ending the invasion and giving humanity a chance to rebuild.

In terms of gameplay, Doom II is similar to the first game, adding only incremental changes to its formula in the form of new monsters and a new weapon. To progress, the player must still navigate non-linear levels, find keys, and unlock new areas while defending against an onslaught of demons. Technologically and graphically the game is identical, though due to more complicated levels and larger fights the base system requirements for the game were higher.

One of Doom II's most significant changes over its predecessor is that it takes place over a single linear sequence of levels - the episode-based structure of the first game was abandoned, as was the map shown on intermission screens; this means that the player no longer has to find new weapons at the start of each episode. Occasional textual interludes are used to advance the story, in the same fashion as the first game's episode endings.

While Doom II's level design is ostensibly based on structures and locations on Earth, in practice it retains much of the abstract design of the first game. Early levels present a techbase theme representing the military starport. The mid-game presents levels with an urban city theme that the player navigates attempting to find the origin of the demonic invasion. The later levels are intended to represent Hell merging with reality, and therefore have a style reminiscent of the Inferno episode of the first game, culminating in a subterranean miasma of Dantean flowing magma and hot springs.

Also introduced is the super shotgun, a more powerful double barreled version of the shotgun from the first game. The Megasphere is additionally introduced as a more powerful version of the Supercharge power up, offering a maximum amount of both health and armor.

Doom II sold over two million copies, the most sales of any id Software game at the time. The new and varied enemies, and its innovative non-linear level design were praised by critics. While well-received, the game was regarded by some as a disappointment due to the lack of major new features and boring level design. It was released around the same time as Star Wars: Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D which presented more obvious enhancements to the genre.

There was no shareware version of Doom II released and it was only sold in retail stores. Internally Doom II is referred to as the "commercial" version, though an enhanced version of the first game was also later re-released in stores as The Ultimate Doom. Official ports were made to various platforms, including the Apple Macintosh, PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, and Xbox.

Doom II's levels are divided into three "episodes", though these are not official. The sky texture for each episode is different, and an intermission screen describes the progress in story in transitioning between them. There are also two secret levels. There are further story interludes before level 7, before each of the secret levels, and after finishing the game. Old versions of SETUP.EXE give names for these episodes, though this was later removed.

According to the German Strafgesetzbuch §86a, the usage of unconstitutional symbols is forbidden outside of certain contexts such as research, teaching and others. Because the two secret maps Wolfenstein and Grosse use swastikas, the German version does not contain these maps to prevent the game from being the subject of search and seizure procedures (as Wolfenstein 3-D had been). This means that it is forbidden to sell, hire or otherwise give the game to anybody, although merely owning the game is legal.

The German release is engineversion 1.666, and doom2.wad is a little bit smaller than is standard. Under MS-DOS, when the player attempts to use the level warp cheat for either of the secret maps, the game instantly crashes.

On the 4th of august 2011 the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien deleted Doom from the Index on request by ZeniMax Media.[1][dead link]

However, the official announcement state, that not all versions are delisted.

Translated: "Only the American version of 'Doom II - Hell on Earth' has been left in the list, because it contains two additional levels with representations from the indexed and nationwide-seized 'Wolfenstein 3D'".

Various screenshots on the back cover of the original Doom II game box display scenery and an arachnotron sprite which are not found in the officially released game. These were likely screenshots from a pre-release version of Doom II which had differing level structure and graphics than what was included in the official commercial release. These unconventional screenshots have been later used in various Doom II re-releases, including the Doom95 repackaging in 1995, the Steam release in 2007 and on id Software's own Doom II page.